Morph Curve and Cycle Stepping

Morph Curve and Cycle Stepping

These controls change how an interpolating Morph travels from START to END. Curve Mode reshapes progress; Cycle-stepped transition changes whether progress is continuous or held for nominal-root-cycle blocks.

In Morph, Curve Mode and Curve Amount are part of the MORPH / EXPORT sound-design controls, while Cycle-stepped transition is part of Transition / Cleanup. Bulk Random and Bulk Explorer keep their own corresponding workspace settings.

Curve Mode

Two public modes are available:

• Bend
• S-curve

Curve Amount

Curve Amount runs from −127 to +127. 0 is neutral/linear.

Bend

🎹 Bend moves more of the transition earlier or later. Use it to delay a dramatic change, front-load movement, favour START or END, or shape a transition effect.

S-curve

🎹 S-curve eases near the endpoints and moves faster through the middle; negative values invert that tendency. It is useful for endpoint holds and a more pronounced central transition.

Fixed Endpoint START-mod-END

🔧 Fixed Endpoint START-mod-END contains no START→END parameter traversal. Curve Mode, Curve Amount, and Cycle-stepped transition therefore have nothing to act on. FWG disables all three while a Fixed Endpoint mode is selected and restores their stored values when another mode becomes active.

Cycle-stepped transition

Off: Morph position can change continuously across output PCM samples.

On: Morph position is held and advanced in nominal-root-cycle steps.

When to use cycle stepping

🎹 Often useful for:

• wavetable-frame-oriented exports;
• discrete timbral slots;
• stepped digital motion;
• examining wavetable-frame-to-wavetable-frame change.

Often unnecessary or undesirable for:

• smooth pads;
• risers and transitions;
• continuous Pitch Offset glides;
• long evolving samples;
• effects intended to smear through intermediate states.

Nominal-cycle caution

⚠️ Cycle boundaries follow Root Frequency, not every audible oscillator period. FM, Pitch Offset, crossfade detuning, and phase-modulated source/carrier rates can all move audible periods away from those blocks.

Cycle-stepped therefore means nominal-root-cycle stepping, not zero-crossing tracking or modulation-period tracking.

Page-load persistence

Morph Render Mode, FFT Anchor States, Curve Mode, and Curve Amount retain the Morph workspace's last committed values across page loads. Cycle-stepped transition persists through the shared Transition / Cleanup group.

Bulk Random and Explorer own their corresponding sound-design/variation state independently.

Morph construction-state quantisation

🔧 With Cycle-stepped Off, the audible output-sample stream moves continuously, but several Morph families construct tables/parameters at a finite set of cached Morph construction states. FWG ordinarily requests about four construction states per nominal root cycle and caps one render at 4,096 construction states.

v3.0 guarantees that cached construction-state contents use canonical Morph positions and reach exact requested endpoints. It does not promise a newly constructed table or filter coefficient for every output PCM sample.